Graeme Hamilton: Jun Lin video is about murder, not high school titillation

Luka Rocco Magnotta video being shown to students disturbing in many ways

It is hard to know what is most troubling about the story of the Montreal high school teacher who showed his class the video depicting the murder and dismemberment of Jun Lin, allegedly at the hands of Luka Rocco Magnotta.

It boggles the mind that a professionally trained teacher, even a junior one filling in for someone on leave, would decide to show a class of 16- and 17-year-olds a video that has sickened hardened police investigators.

Luka Rocco Magnotta will be held in pre-extradition custody in Berlin on a court’s order as his likely return to Canada to face charges for the alleged murder and dismemberment of Chinese student Jun Lin in Montreal nears, authorities said Wednesday.Berlin state court spokesman Tobias Kaehne said the court decided at the end of last week that there was enough evidence to keep Magnotta behind bars pending extradition.

“That means that he must now remain in custody until a possible extradition to Canada,” he said.

The teacher was suspended with pay the day he showed the video, and on Wednesday he faced a disciplinary hearing with school board officials.

It was an inexcusable misstep, for which he could face serious consequences, but he is not the first teacher to display horrible judgment, and his offence is not the worst in the annals of education.

Just as unsettling as the teacher’s behaviour is the enthusiasm of a class of about 25 students to see what they all knew was a gruesome depiction of an actual murder.

As news crews descended on Cavelier-de-LaSalle High School Wednesday, students jumped to their teacher’s defence, stressing that they had been the ones who asked to see the video.

“Our teacher simply made it easier for us,” one student who was in the class told Radio-Canada. “I don’t think he should have shown the video, but making him lose his job would be going too far, because he did what the students wanted,” another told TVA.

On the morning of June 4, the same day Mr. Magnotta was arrested in Berlin, students in the Grade 10 history course reportedly asked the teacher about watching the video. By then, the gruesome killing had been front-page news for days. The teacher hesitated but agreed to put the question to a show of hands. When all but two or three students voted in favour, he projected the video — titled 1 Lunatic 1 Icepick by its author — on a screen at the front of the class.

The video, which appeared online the day after Mr. Lin disappeared, shows the repeated stabbing of a bound naked man with an icepick. The victim is decapitated, his limbs hacked off, sexual acts are performed on the remains and there is apparent cannibalism.

The teacher apparently skipped some of the more graphic parts, but even an edited version would seem to contain enough for a lifetime of nightmares.

Still, none of the students who spoke to media Wednesday let on that they had been overly traumatized. Immediately after the school administration learned of what the teacher had done, it created a “crisis cell” of psychologists and counsellors to help the students over the next two days, but a school board official said only “a few” students requested the services.

As the teacher was meeting with school board labour-relations officials Wednesday to determine his fate, students began circulating a petition calling for him to keep his job, the Journal de Montréal reported.

Benjamin Kutsyuruba, a professor of education at Queen’s University who was following the controversy Wednesday, said there is no question that the teacher crossed ethical and moral lines. But the problem is those lines are becoming increasingly blurred.

“I think this society in general has dulled its sense of what’s appropriate and inappropriate due to regular scenes of violence in movies, and especially in computer games,” he said. “In this case, I think students just wanted to see something that they’ve been seeing in movies happening in reality.”

Chantal Longpré, president of the provincial federation of school principals, said substitute teachers can feel added pressure to satisfy their students.

“A young teacher starts in a new job, you want to please the students, you want to get called back as a substitute teacher, and often you might want to give in to demands of students,” she said. “But the students are not always capable of making the right choices, and they need guidance. This choice was completely inappropriate.”

The Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys, the school board responsible for the LaSalle school, issued a news release calling the screening of the video “an unacceptable action for which all consequences are being considered, right up to the firing of the teacher.” Its investigation had not been completed by the end of the day Wednesday.